Friday Facts #243 - New GUI tileset

[Albert]

Nice work on the UI. By the way, are you going to make the UI works for different UI scales? (related thread)

Yes. That's the intention.

[muzzy]

THANKS FOR YOUR OPINION!!!!!

Sorry for yelling. It's been forever since I was last able to play this game. It seems nobody else is affected by the issue, but certain kind of gradients (linear shadow gradients and certain kind of radial ones) wreck with my head and cause slight dizziness, headache, and make things seem like they're out of focus. Everything was great while the UI was flat gray, until in 0.15 the graphics were tweaked and bunch of pointless gradients were added for no reason whatsoever. I managed to play that version merely a few minutes until I just couldn't deal with the UI anymore. Every time I opened the UI it strained my eyes, and it was because of those stupid goddamn fucking gradients in the item tiles. I've been complaining about it occasionally and waiting, waiting to see if it ever gets fixed. You know, hopefully fixed when you finally make the full gui revamp. It's been over a year now, and that's a year without Factorio. I used to play almost every day. I would still play if I could. I eagerly wait every friday to read FFF, and when I saw "New GUI tileset" as a post title, I was SOOO excited! You know, maybe I could finally play again! HAHA, NO. Just more gratuitous gradients. Fuck this shit.

[Sigma1]

THANKS FOR YOUR OPINION!!!!!

Sorry for yelling. It's been forever since I was last able to play this game. It seems nobody else is affected by the issue, but certain kind of gradients (linear shadow gradients and certain kind of radial ones) wreck with my head and cause slight dizziness, headache, and make things seem like they're out of focus. Everything was great while the UI was flat gray, until in 0.15 the graphics were tweaked and bunch of pointless gradients were added for no reason whatsoever. I managed to play that version merely a few minutes until I just couldn't deal with the UI anymore. Every time I opened the UI it strained my eyes, and it was because of those stupid goddamn fucking gradients in the item tiles. I've been complaining about it occasionally and waiting, waiting to see if it ever gets fixed. You know, hopefully fixed when you finally make the full gui revamp. It's been over a year now, and that's a year without Factorio. I used to play almost every day. I would still play if I could. I eagerly wait every friday to read FFF, and when I saw "New GUI tileset" as a post title, I was SOOO excited! You know, maybe I could finally play again! HAHA, NO. Just more gratuitous gradients. Fuck this shit.

You can go to your factorio installation folder and then to data/core/graphics and edit gui.png with your preferred editor and remove the gradients in the current version :)

Oh, and back up your edited file, it will get overwritten with updates!

[FunMaker]

It's all fine. But one thing i would like to mention:

The glow around buttons just looks like the default Photoshop glow without any modification. Looks a bit lazy with that knowledge in the background.

[aland]

I really like the look, and as someone who is red-green colorblind, I appreciate your work to make it easier for me to play! Use of non-color cues, like the shapes of the Confirm/Back buttons and placement of the text inside is great!

I also appreciate the use of checkboxes AND switches. Switches are awesome for labelled pairs, like you're using, but I they always briefly confuse me when used with only a single label, as is common on iOS and Android these days. (Drury's answer to Gergely is a perfect example of how to pick between them.)

It does seem weird to me that the disabled version of the Confirm button is still quite bright. I'd expect a very dark green.

Ormek: If "cancel" is the safe option, I think it better to redesign the dialog to avoid it. Put the important information on the button itself. "Exit program? Your data will be lost! [Cancel] [OK]" could become "Exit program? [Keep playing] [Exit and lose data]".

[muzzy]

edit gui.png

I'll definitely do that if the damn thing is still there in 1.0, I don't really want to tinker with the base files unless absolutely necessary. I just totally foresee murphy's law in action, and I bet right after I finished modding the graphics the game would start checksumming them to stop people altering landmine graphics to cheat in multiplayer. Anyway, I never thought I'd have to wait this long with the gui revamp moving forward in the roadmap again and again, but now that I've already waited a year I can totally wait another...

[Sigma1]

I bet right after I finished modding the graphics the game would start checksumming them to stop people altering landmine graphics to cheat in multiplayer.

Knowing Factorio seems pretty open with the base game files, I would say this is pretty unlikely. Especially since you can already override vanilla graphics with mods.

[MarvinCZ]

I am not sure if it wasn't answered already somewhere, but do you plan to add any close buttons to window gui (in window title, maybe?) so they could be closed by mouse instead of current state which requires keyboad?

[alefu]

Great work! The only thing that bugs me, is that the editable fields are standing out. I feel like this is contrary to all other applications I know and makes them look to much like buttons.

[Ahry]

New gui look good but.

Almost every hover element looks almost same like pressed. One exception is in radio button, I suspect that pressed will be with yellow in the middle not with black in the middle like everywhere else.

[LuckyBadger]

I want "Biter mating behaviour" too.

Then it is such a small step to biter genetics, and then we can have biter breeding. And if you could export your creations (like with blueprints) that would liven up multiplayer games no end.

Biter training would, of course, be a whole different can of worms.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Can we customize the positioning of the hotbars? I am in favor of the old idea that was passed once that the hotbar simply reflects what you have in your inventory rather than being itself a storage space. And with this, I would want more hotbar unlocks so I can get a lot more variety of things on there. Since the screen is so large and the buttons are so small, I would want to put some of the hotbar panels beside each other, so that I have twenty or thirty buttons across the bottom instead of only ten.

If you can't face the inevitable backlash that would arise from nerfing the inventory, then perhaps you could provide the option for players to add non-inventory hotbars to their UI in an unlimited fashion, simply enabling them to access their inventory without opening it.

[Sigma1]

If you can't face the inevitable backlash that would arise from nerfing the inventory

Just stick a few more slots in the main inventory and add a couple of size upgrade researches for it

Can we customize the positioning of the hotbars?

This. Especially if you could have the toolbar as a sort of dock which you can freely put on whatever spot on the screen edges you may think of.

[molerat]

I want to also mention that we are actually taking care of the 8% of the population who has some sort of color vision problems. This subject is still very new for us, but we are without a doubt researching solutions to different conditions.

You are awesome. Give yourself a cookie on my behalf. So many games just ignore this and do things like having blue and purple as the colors for different things that are important to tell the difference between, and people like me basically see them as the same color.

It was one of the reasons I didn't play Planetside 2 very long. I saw a red team, a blue team, and another blue team.

So yes, big big thank you for this.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I just make one thing purple and the other thing violet. Everybody can tell those apart, right? I mean, they are at opposite ends of the color spectrum.

[Aeternus]

Please, please stop measuring things, anything, in device dependent coordinates. Please stop using pixels. IMHO, nothing should ever surface pixels as a coordinate system, ever!

The use of pixels has caused enormous amounts of pain as people switch to 4k displays. They will cause enormous amounts of pain in the future when display technologies change again. Please stop using them. If you must, surface a 'DPI' configuration or something and have it operate at a very low level so coordinates used in almost all parts of the code do not depend on any details of the display like pixels.

We've known not to use pixels for literally decades, and yet people keep using them. Please stop.

... you do know what the "D" in DPI stands for right? A "dot". Which is a pixel. Literally. 4K displays just have more "pixels" to work with. Which unless you plan to be a few centimeters from your screen, or are playing on a massive widescreen plasma TV, won't be a problem to just upsize the existing GUI.

The only other alternative would be to render the GUI clientside at runtime, and have all GUI components defined as some kind of 2d or 3d object that would then need to be created by the graphics engine rather then loaded from a datafile. Performance wise I doubt that'd be good.

[LemonyFresh]

When I see the big NPE? on the board, I imagine that the developers are having an enormous amount of trouble with some Null Pointer Exception

[Omnifarious]

The only other alternative would be to render the GUI clientside at runtime, and have all GUI components defined as some kind of 2d or 3d object that would then need to be created by the graphics engine rather then loaded from a datafile. Performance wise I doubt that'd be good.

If people had been using some device independent coordinate system for stuff right along, this wouldn't be a problem. One solution for 2D GUI components would be to store them as SVG and then render them at game startup into something that can be splatted onto the screen really quickly.

And yes, I do know that it means 'dots' and that 'dots' is another name for 'pixels' (at least on an active visual display rather than a piece of paper).

Lastly, while I would vastly prefer that everybody (most especially people who make web pages) specify things in device independent coordinates and make very conservative assumptions about the size of my screen, I would also find that slightly inconvenient as I like ridiculously tiny fonts. I insist on 4k displays for everything now so I can have ridiculously tiny fonts that are also anti-aliased. It would be nice sometimes to scale text independently of other GUI elements. Particularly ones that are expected to be precise targets for a mouse or finger. And yes, I do realize that presents a contradiction for hyperlinks. I would prefer they adopt the text size.

To give you an idea of what I mean by tiny fonts, I can now fit 3 81 column emacs windows on my screen side-by-side with no overlaps and space to spare. I realize that I'm quite bizarre in this. Everybody who looks at my screen wonders what the heck I'm doing. But I like it.

Outside of games, I absolutely abhor user interfaces that assume they can occupy my entire screen.

[Pod]

On the whiteboard picture, under the "Research a solution" section, there is: "Mmmg (hand + auto)". What's Mmmg?

[Masterfox]

On the whiteboard picture, under the "Research a solution" section, there is: "Mmmg (hand + auto)". What's Mmmg?

I think it say mining, the in just looks like an m.